How to make your customers value your SaaS product?

Imagine having a paying customer for few good years, and one fateful day, they decide they don’t want to use your product anymore? 

Such situations are inevitable. In fact, although the data varies across industries over time, it is calculated that in SaaS, the average churn rate is around 5%, and a “good” churn rate is considered 3% or less. The journey of developing a trusted paying customer base is undoubtedly a challenging one. After the relentless efforts of generating leads and converting leads into customers, you are tasked with one important challenge. How do you make them stay? 

Speaking about the churn ratio reminded me of a recent incident. A few weeks back, one of our customers told us they don’t want to use our product anymore as they weren’t sure of its value. We were taken aback since it was one of the long-time paying customers, and they had generated significant leads and even made sales using WotNot. 

There’s more to the story, and I promise it has a happy ending.

In our attempt to retain the customer, we generated important data metrics such as the cost saved, the hours saved, and the business value the customer availed from the bot. Basically, all the points that a decision-making authority would want to look at. We shared it with the client, and he was genuinely impressed with the results!

Show your product value!

We then realised that it was important to have a continuous mechanism that reminds the customer of the value proposition and ROI that WotNot was offering. To drive your sales and have a healthy growth rate, you need to work towards customer success which is very crucial in the SaaS industry. According to stats, a customer retention rate of 35% and above is great for the SaaS industry. We cannot just convince our clients with just words and commitments. We need to show them that the product is, in fact, performing and involve them in the review process. 

Keeping them in the loop is probably the biggest takeaway here. We needed to have a regular process to showcase our product value to customers and ultimately get a higher Net Promoter Score from them. So how about a long-term solution where your customers can see the value your product is generating for them on a regular basis?  

Why Dashboard Email Report?

Email Marketing has been a popular channel for B2B companies. They enjoy an open rate of 21.3%, and 31% of B2B marketers’ cite email marketing as the channel that makes the biggest impact on revenue. Emails eliminate the need to continuously call them over a short period yet deliver crucial information on time. We decided to roll out a weekly report for all our customers. The aim here is to send a weekly email report with a dashboard that graphically shows the results from using WotNot. Remember, this report can be a decision-making tool for your customers, so you need to include the right data metrics. Your email needs to be inclusive and should have accurate information that can create a lasting impression on your customers.  

Emails have long been used in the SaaS industry for various purposes such as customer onboarding, promotional offers, sending invitations for webinars, etc. But they haven’t been fully utilised for sending weekly reviews. We think they should for the following reasons. 

Transparency with the clients: This report would keep the clients in the loop all the time and help us have a transparent relationship with them. You aren’t just sharing results to celebrate a milestone. You’re making it a part of the process where your client has the freedom to check how the tool is performing for their business on a regular basis. 

Track performances: Successful customers have one thing in common. They are constantly monitoring and updating their KPIs. This dashboard will help your clients track their bot KPIs. Was its purpose of generating leads, and did it achieve that? Or was it to raise support tickets? If that was the case, how much did the business save on support costs? It will give a comprehensive outlook of how many conversions increased, has the business value generated increased or decreased, etc. 

Spot issues and improvise: The results obviously allow our clients and us to look for problems in bot integration. Has the number of contacts decreased? Then we need to change the conversation flow to make it more lead-generation friendly. Has the number of conversations decreased? We need to create a quirky pop-up to urge users to chat with the bot. 

Touch of personalisation: Emails proves to be an ideal medium to send across personalised messages using customer data, and personalised emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates! Personalised emails can also offer $20 in ROI for every $1 invested! This whole process of sending a personalised review shows your clients that you care, and ultimately, it can work in developing a close relationship and building trust with them. 

Things to Consider

Before you send out your emails, etch your ultimate motive in your mind- to show your product value. These emails will be different from the rest in terms of their design, content, and outlook, which is why you need to redefine your email strategy for sending dashboard review emails. 

Consistency: You don’t want to spam your clients with daily emails. A weekly Email helps your client track their performance more regularly. It gives them time to change or improve their bot performance if they see declining results in certain data metrics. Besides, according to data, it is ideal for B2B companies to either send emails 2-3 times a month or 4-5 times a month. 

Design: The email needs to be detailed yet easy to read. So, can we all agree that an interactive screen with your result is visually appealing and easy to analyse than a complicated spreadsheet? A panoramic view of what’s working and what’s not is a quick way to show the product’s performance.

Context: To actually know whether the matrix is good or bad, you need to provide context to your customers. Context is the amount of increase or decrease as compared to the previous week’s performance. It will help your customers compare current results with the past performance data.

Things to Include

The metrics you should keep in your dashboard depend upon your product KPIs. In our case, we include the following metrics and the percentage change. 

Conversations Handled: The number of conversations that a bot handles every day shows the website’s engagement level and helps you understand the bot performance. A continuous conversation allows you to measure the in and out messages and know how helpful the conversation was. You can have many users that had minimal interaction with the bot or a small number of users having frequent conversations. Hence, your bot's effectiveness is measured by the total conversations it handled. 

CSAT Rating: The CSAT rating lets your clients measure the customer satisfaction level from the chat experience on the bot.

Contacts Generated: At the end of the day, all our clients want to check the number of leads generated. The contacts generated will show the leads the client has generated from the bot. 

Business Value Generated: Business Value is undoubtedly a major aspect that the decision-making authority would be interested in. It will tell your clients how many sales did the bot actually generate. Is it providing a good ROI? The numbers can be a game-changer for many customers to appreciate what your product is doing for them.

Hours Saved: Whenever we integrate a digital tool, we need to know- Did the tool actually help in freeing up agents to work on more important matters? This metric will give your customers answers to whether your bot was able to fulfil its purpose of answering repetitive questions and providing continuous support all by itself, saving time as a result. 

Costs Saved:  Finally, was your tool able to save costs and generate good ROI for your customers? The cost saved would be another crucial decision-making factor for your clients and show how much value your product generated for them. 

Location: Knowing where the traffic interacts with the bot will help customers define and design a strategy for their target audience. It can also help them know if they need to deploy multilingual bots for specific countries or adopt a more polite form of communication according to the region.

Top pages: This section shows the total number of conversations taking place on each website page, in descending order. These insights of page data help customers know which pages are converting/engaging most visitors. Armed with these insights, customers can smartly run their advertisements to get the most ROI.

We’re all aware that one of the most crucial aspects of SaaS marketing is to work towards your customers having an ‘Aha’ moment with your product- the moment of epiphany that your product is precisely what the customer is looking for. But this moment cannot be short-lived. Your customers need to feel that way continuously for you to survive in this fiercely competitive market. This review mail can extensively help you keep that moment alive and help you garner the much-needed appreciation and value proposition for growth.